Jerry.  I had a brief look at the State of Montana apiary registration regulations. https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/80/6/80-6-111.htm

Among other matters of interest I read, “Before registering new apiary sites, the department shall give at least 10 days' notice by certified mail to all registered apiarists who are likely to be affected by the proposed new apiary site. Any affected party may file a written protest with the department against registering the new apiary site.”

Also, as you noted on Feb. 1st, “[a]t 11 Colonies the Apiary automatically comes under a Commercial classification and must meet the requirement of 3 miles from another commercial beekeepers apiary.  MT in 2018 had nearly 6000 registered apiary locations which are located by GPS or to the nearest quarter section. THE MAPS ARE PUBLIC, ONLINE" (my emphasis in caps). 

The public nature of your apiary locations is of interest to me.  How is the public right to know about apiary locations reconciled with your privacy rights which are embedded in the State of Montana Constitution, Article II, section 10?

In my part of North America (Newfoundland and Labrador), we have privacy legislation which makes it impossible for government to publicize apiary locations.  One of the absurd consequences of this is that we have not been able to know the location of quarantine zones. In 2016 we had two or more quarantine zones established around apiaries with packaged bees imported from Western Australia. The IDs of the importing beekeepers and their apiaries were a personal and state secret.  Nonetheless, their IDs were determined by other means, not communications from government or the beeks themselves. In one case, I’m pretty certain the quarantine was established in an area with nearby apiaries and overlapping hb flight zones.  Moreover, any beek could move colonies in and out of the quarantine zone without knowledge of the existence of the quarantine. Personal privacy trumped the interests of other beekeepers.  I can’t see this changing without a legal/court challenge, but who wants to spend the bucks on that? 

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